ABOUT NICS

Application Acceleration Center of Excellence

The Application Acceleration Center of Excellence (AACE) was established by the Joint Institute for Computational Sciences (JICS) in 2011 in partnership with NICS, Cray, and Intel.

AACE's mission

To prepare the national supercomputing community to effectively and efficiently utilize future computing technologies

To optimize applications for current and future compute systems, including those using the Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor and GPGPUs

To develop expertise in the expression and exploitation of fine-grain and medium-grain parallelism

To conduct research and education programs focused on developing and transferring knowledge related to emerging computing technologies, including the Beacon Project, sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the State of Tennessee

To guide the development of future supercomputing architectures and programming models through co-design activities with HPC vendors and manufacturers, including early access to Cray and Intel technologies

To be a leader in sustainable software infrastructure for simulation in science and engineering, such as the Beacon machine which was named Number One on the Green500 in November 2012 with a performance of 2.449 GFlops/Watt.

AACE has a multi-year strategic engagement with Intel to jointly pursue:

Development of next-generation, high-performance computing solutions based on the Intel® Many Integrated Core (MIC) architecture

Design of scientific applications emphasizing a sustainable approach for both performance and productivity